


you did your dissertation on the rise and fall of man

by haloud



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Shin Ankoku Ryuu to Hikari no Ken | Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 07:35:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11157234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: Xane has been around for a long, long time.  Long enough to see power flow from spring to sea; long enough to remember the first, clean breaths of divinity.  Long enough to teach him that, be it the seasons, the hearts of man, or the aching in his chest, nothing ever really changes.





	you did your dissertation on the rise and fall of man

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from bolt cutter by doomtree.

Though he has lost his birthright as a divine dragon, Xane belongs to the fabric of the world’s magic.  Anri’s legacy, suffused in light, throbs in time with his pulse, with every dragon’s pulse.  Borders and countries mean little to the immortal, but Falchion glows golden and unconquerable.  Until, that is, it doesn’t.  Lord Gotoh summons Xane on the day Falchion dims on the edge of his consciousness as if covered in a shroud.

Medeus rises again, he says, and Xane bites back a thousand scornful words for the human heroes rising to quell him.  “You wish me to do what, precisely?” He asks, biting a nail and cutting his eyes away from Lord Gotoh’s motionless form.  “I have more in common with your evil adversary than with the little goslings, don’t I?”

When Lord Gotoh draws himself up he looms as large as any dragon.  He looks down his nose at Xane.  Even after thirteen hundred years, his lord’s disappointment dries up any words or pride Xane possesses.

And you will go to the side of the Hero-King and you will fulfill your role, Lord Gotoh says.  His words reverberate in Xane’s bones, rattles his soft little teeth, and propels him out the door before he can think of any objection.

And that is what leads Xane to the land of his softest memories, and that is what leads Xane to a Gra-held cell, and that is what leads Xane to clasping the prince’s hand too tightly, too close to be a stranger. The nickname falls off Xane’s tongue like a pearl, like a ruby.  Like some other kind of precious, precious stone.  _Princey,_ he says, and his voice lilts, and his lip curls around the word as it reverberates in the air between himself and Marth of Altea.  A mistake, perhaps, to throw it out immediately, but Xane’s self-control is open and shut once more before he can stop himself.

It’s there in the arch of Marth’s neck, in the rigid nobility of his spine, in the way gold and cobalt look against his skin.  He is too focused to react with confusion to a stranger’s familiarity, and Xane is at least somewhat lucky in his slip-up.

_Princey_ is far more easily explained than _Annie,_ after all.

It’s him.  It’s him, it’s him, it’s him.  Xane’s blood sings beneath his skin in all the parts of him that usually creak and ache, too big for the skin he’s in.

Over the centuries, Xane has more unconsciously than not avoided the fertile little corner of the world that Anri once called home.  What is there for him but ugly memories?  Life is lived far more easily drifting in the wild places of Archanea and finding direction only on the orders of Lord Gotoh.  Somehow, despite full knowledge of the path Lord Gotoh set him upon, Xane still had not expected to remember so clearly the fierce heat that blooms inside of him when he sets his eyes upon that prince of humans.

_Annie, Annie!_ You had long hair once, Prince, and you didn’t scream even once when your blade and hands were bathed in dragonfire…

Marth of Altea steps lightly over the corpse of one of Xane’s captors, and Xane watches him go framed in weak sunlight.  What has it been, one hundred years?  Little more than a human lifetime, if Xane understands correctly, two at most.  When did Annie die?  Did he?  Things are so hard to keep straight, and humans are so hard to track in their growings and changings and dyings.  If this pulse pounds the same as the one Xane once so longed to hear, what’s to say the mind and body aren’t the same as well?

Lord Gotoh would look upon him with such pity.

Xane slips back into the role of camp follower, companion, and warrior more easily than he changes skins, even after centuries of practice.  His mission to go to the League completed, he is free to glut himself on an entirely new collection of shapes to try on.  The dashing mercenary commander, the straight-backed Pegasus knight, and the soft-eyed cleric woman are his favorites.  No one knows what to make of him, but he is used to being on his own.  His instinct is to take to the tents and campfires in the familiar forms of the comrades people are already used to, but the amusement those antics brings pales in comparison to the fear in people’s eyes.  People hate what they do not understand, and hatred is only going to make Xane’s life more difficult.  He decides on isolation, and keeps to the fringes.

Being a part of an army brings a whole list of necessary habits and rituals Xane thought he had long discarded.  Chiefly among them is sleep, for Xane cannot remember the last time he dreamed.  Sleep, for Xane, is less rest and more stolen hours of swirling, misty immobility.  The spirits of dragons retreat to their stones to sleep, after all, and it has been long even by his standards since Xane could call himself a dragon.  He once asked the sage to peer into his unconscious mind and find an answer to his questions about where he goes when he closes his eyes, but the only answer he received was a steady gaze and a bracing hand upon his shoulder.

Now, however…perhaps it is his proximity to the proper bloodline, or perhaps it is the raising of Medeus, or perhaps it is Gharnef’s tampering with the minds of divine dragons.  But he closes his eyes and he hears himself call _Annie!_ And he wakes with his own tears dripping into his mouth.  It is disconcerting to dream again, to wake and have memories of sleeping.  To feel rested or unrested based on a night’s events.  After so much stagnation, Xane is forced to recall inconstancy. 

He knew what Anri dreamed, once.  They sat beside each other beneath a sprawling, cooling sky.  Anri asked if the dragons knew different names for the constellations.  Older names.  True names.

_“_ No thing has a truer name than what you decide it must be called,” Xane had said loftily.  “To claim anything else is folly.  The oldest tongues have no need for labels at all.  Call things whatever comforts you.  As for the stars…”  He scratched an itch on his calf and considered for a moment.  “This world has patterns everywhere.  Humans find it comforting to assign meaning to some of them, but what need have dragons to do the same?  Your stars bear the names of gods and heroes, but dragons have neither.”

Anri had frowned and admonished Xane for speaking so flippantly about Naga and his forbears.  Reprimanded by an ant, Xane had laughed and laughed and basked in the impassioned shine of the hero-king’s eyes.  Their hands pressed into the cool, dewy grass, fingertips mere inches from touching.  Heart in his throat, Xane flexed and stretched his hand in slight increments, wanting, aching, swung out over an abyss on a single string.

In the end, cowardice won out.  In the end, cowardice won out; the sentence can apply to so many turning points in Xane’s very long life, but in this case it applies to the tingling that froze him still and kept him from moving those last few centimeters to brush his skin to Anri’s.

_No thing has a truer name,_ he had said, burying his emotions in philosophy and thankful that his voice comes out smooth.  He scoffed at the idea of _essence_ or trueness of any form.  How ignorant he had been before being trapped in his too-small bones.

* * *

 

 “I’m sorry, Xaney,” Tiki whines, tightening her little arms around his neck and dropping her chin onto his shoulder. 

“Don’t apologize,” he replies, shifting her so he has a more secure grip.  He’d rather proceed in silence if possible, and he did volunteer for this.  Better he carries her than the old man; Bantu is likely to slip a disc, and then where would they be.  Besides, it isn’t like she weighs much.

“But what if _you_ twist your ankle now too?  If you get hurt it’s worse because you can’t heal—“

“Enough, Tiki!  I said it’s fine,” Xane snaps, but then she buries a little sniffle against his shoulder and he can’t help but relent.  “C’mon, T.  You’re just a little bird; you barely weigh a thing.  And I’m so big and strong, yeah?”  Xane takes on the bulk of a gladiator he once met in the north, sending Tiki rocketing another foot and a half or so off the ground.  She giggles wildly, clinging on to his back, and Xane heaves a sigh of relief at the averted crisis.

“You’re funny, Xaney.”  There’s a bit of a question to her statement, though—an indication that she might have more questions on the tip of her tongue.

“I’m _extraordinary,”_ he responds with a grin over his newly-bulging shoulder.  “Now, how many types of butterflies can you name?”

Sufficiently distracted, Tiki gets lost in pointing out insects and wildflowers and trying to figure out which of the names for them Xane provides is the real one.

He’ll tell her everything.  Someday.  When they both are ready.

He intends to, anyway, but when Tiki dreams those horrible, strange dreams she still has, she knows his death will come first.

* * *

 

The lady Artemis glimmered in the moonlight.  That is Xane’s one memory of her.  To his shame, he avoided her presence or any talk of her as avidly as possible in those young, ardent days.  This fact renders him incapable of levying any practical, political advice for Nyna of Archanea now, not that he’s been solicited as such anyway.

On the emotional side of things, however, Xane can provide.  Marth spares her not a second glance.  Xane knows in a way incomparable, inexpressible, the tearing pain in her soul as she attempts to construct her days to avoid thoughts of the man who does not regard her, the man who she cannot regard, or the man she possesses no soft feeling for despite all attempts.

One day, Xane slips into the skin of one of Queen Nyna’s handmaidens.  As he pours water from the pitcher beside her bed, he says, “It will get easier, my lady.”

“Hm?” She makes a questioning noise, glancing up from her paperwork.

“The road ahead is fraught, and you will spend many sleepless nights attempting to reconcile the life you have with the life you desire.  However, you will find that things get easier more quickly than you might imagine.”

“You are being very strange today, Vya.”

“Apologies for being presumptuous, Your Grace,” Xane says, bobbing a quick curtsey.

“I merely,” Queen Nyna begins, but Xane leaves before she can complete her words.  The swift sound of slippers on the stone floor follows him, and, as he rounds the corner, Xane allows the pursuing Queen to catch a glimpse of his regular body disappearing down the stairs.  Chances are that she will not even remember the strange red-haired lad from the war, but at least now the real Vya may escape awkward questions.

A few strange words from an immortal wearing the guise of a friend will never be enough.  Xane knows this.  It’s disgustingly human of him, but regardless of the futility, he cannot help but try. 

 

* * *

 

He never once saw Anri all in white.  The blue brought out his hair; the gold dripped with royalty and vaulted him to the sky, where he was untouchable even by dragons.  Xane saw him all in red and silver on the solstice, green and windswept on the first day of spring.  He wore all black for months to mourn the deaths of Medeus’s victims, in velvet and linen and satin, like a ghost in his own halls but for the high spots of color in his cheeks and the steadiness of his step.  Anri lit up the world in so many colors, but never white.  Even on the day of his own wedding, he dressed in the pale blue of prosperity, or so Xane heard. 

Would Anri have even wanted him there?  Xane imagines that Anri wanted as few close companions there as possible to avoid subjecting his wife to sideways un-questions about Lady Artemis.  By the time Anri wed, anyway, the war was long since over, and with it any fair reason Xane possessed to expect Anri to tolerate his company.

Bridges burned, choices made.  It becomes increasingly difficult to remember what mistakes were made and how not to make them again.  Step one:  Xane is prominent in attendance on the day of King Marth and Princess Caeda’s wedding.  He owes it to his own memory, he feels.  He swathes himself in Altean blue and stands to the side of the wedding party, amusing himself with the idea that he would be an honored guest.

Marth watches his bride with radiant joy, and when she slides her hand into his she too is engulfed in golden light.  They kneel together, blessed by Naga, and Xane whispers his own, private blessing in a voice that hasn’t woven a blessing in centuries.  It’s a tiny thing, a bitter thing, but it is all he has to offer.  _Let the blood of the Hero-King lead to long life and prosperity,_ he croons, until his voice cracks and goes silent once more.

 

**Author's Note:**

> xane is one of my top 5 favorite archanea characters. this fic is just my interpretation of him. i'm by no means an archanea buff, so feel free to let me know if i got anything wrong :3
> 
> you can find me at haloud.tumblr.com!
> 
> note: the whole verse that the title of this fic is found in was my refrain for this fic.
> 
> you know i've seen a little glory, and your trinket isn't it  
> save your voice, i know the story: "man abandons sinking ship"  
> i heard you did your dissertation on the rise and fall of man  
> said the golden era's over, but we'll rise and fall again  
> we lost some time, we lost some ground  
> man, look alive; we lost enough  
> yeah, look around; we're finders now  
> clean that shit up, you're losing blood  
> this ain't kansas  
> show of hands if you said your prayers  
> now put 'em down if you got answers  
> this place, it takes the faith of a mantis.


End file.
